Research

“Making Yourself Attractive: Pre-Marital Investments and The Returns to Education in the Marriage Market” (Job Market Paper-Revised version)

Abstract: This paper investigates, theoretically and empirically, how changes in marriage market conditions affect pre-marital investments. I first show how changes in the sex ratio -- that is, the ratio of males to females -- alter incentives for investments both in the context of a unitary and a collective model of the household. I then test this prediction using exogenous variation in ethnic marriage market sex ratio generated by immigration shocks. A worsening of marriage market conditions is found to spur higher pre-marital human capital investments measured by various proxies. A change of the sex ratio from one to two leads men to increase their educational investment by 0.5 years on average and women to decrease it by 0.05 years. In addition, because pre-marital investments affect labor supply in itself, a change in the sex ratio modifies post-marital labor outcomes through this channel, an effect that has been overlooked by previous studies using marriage market conditions as exogenous variation in the bargaining power inside the marriage. The magnitude of these pre-marital effects imply that ignoring them when using marriage market conditions as proxies for ex-post bargaining power may lead to incorrect conclusions. Overall, these results suggest that there are substantial returns to education on the marriage market, and that both men and women take these returns into account when making education decisions.

“Marry for What?  Mate Selection in Modern India” (with Abhijit Banerjee, Esther Duflo and Maitreesh Ghatak)

Abstract: This paper studies the role played by caste, education, and other attributes in arranged marriages among middle class Indians. We interviewed a sample of parents of prospective grooms and brides who placed matrimonial ads in a popular Bengali newspaper. We collected information about the number of responses that they got to the ad as well as the details of a subset of these responses, how they ranked these responses, whether they actually wrote back to them and their ranking of other ads in the newspaper. A year later, we surveyed them a second time and learned about the ultimate outcome of their search: whether their child was married, and with whom.  We use the first interview data to infer the preferences for castes, education, beauty, and other attributes.  We then compute a set of stable matches, which we compare to the actual matches that we observe in the data. We find the stable matches to look quite similar to the actual matches, suggesting a relatively frictionless marriage market. One of the key empirical finding of this study is that there is a very strong preference for in-caste marriage. For example, parents are ready to marry their child to someone with many fewer years of education if that person is from their own caste. However, because this preference is shared by both sides of the markets, and because the groups are fairly homogenous in terms of other attributes, in equilibrium, the cost of insisting on marrying within one’s caste is small. This allows castes to remain a persistent feature of the marriage market.